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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Jewelry & Gems / One Pound of Sumerian Steatite, Shell & Faience Tubular Beads
Near East, Mesopotamia, Sumerian. A full pound of ancient beads, hundreds of them, each a short cylinder or barrel pierced along its length and softened by burial to a chalky bloom. Creams and bone-whites of shell and weathered faience sit against the smoky grays, olive greens, and scattered rust reds of steatite, a stone soft enough to be cut with a copper point and then fired to hardness. Beads of this gauge were strung into dense multi-strand collars, wristlets, and anklets, stitched onto garments, and poured into graves as portable wealth; the Early Dynastic cemeteries of southern Mesopotamia produced them in tens of thousands. Consistent in size yet endlessly varied in tone, they record the patient arithmetic of workshops turning out adornment on something close to an industrial scale. Bead-making in third-millennium BCE Sumer was a specialized trade sustained by long-distance exchange: steatite travelled west from the Persian plateau and beyond, marine shell came up from the Persian Gulf, and faience, a self-glazing quartz paste, was an entirely synthetic material that allowed artisans to approximate the blue-green of costly turquoise and lapis lazuli at a fraction of the cost. The tubular bead was the workhorse of the repertoire, produced in volume to fill the long strands recovered from graves at Ur, Kish, and Nippur, where the dead were equipped with ornament both as a marker of rank and as provision for the world to come. Item # 203209
Estimate:$350
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorJewelry & Gems
Estimate:
$350
RING 18K VITGULD MED 1 ODLAD PÄRLA OCH 3 BRILJANTER.
09/29/2026
$299.72
Est: $401.57
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SKJORTKNAPPAR & MANSCHETTKNAPP, 14k guld, 3 st skjortknappar dekoretat
09/29/2026
$219.79
Est: $220.86
